Somehow—anyhow—Helen scrambled on. She was obliged to keep eyes and mind intent on each step. Her chief object was to imitate Barth, to poise, and jump, and clamber with feet and hands exactly as he did. At this stage the rope was obviously a hindrance; but none of the men suggested its removal, and Helen had enough to occupy her wits without troubling them by a question. Even in the stress of her own breathless exertions she had room in her mind for a wondering pity for the heavily laden Karl. She marveled that anyone, be he strong as Samson, could carry such a load and not fall under it. Yet he was lumbering along behind Bower with a clumsy agility that was almost supernatural to her thinking. She was still unconscious of the fact that most of her own struggles were due more to the rarefied air than to the real difficulties of the route.
At last, when she really thought she must cry out for a rest, when a steeper climb than any hitherto encountered had bereft her almost of the power to take another upward spring to the ledge of some enormous boulder, when her knees and ankles were sore and bruised, and the skin of her fingers was beginning to fray under her stout gloves, she found herself standing on a comparatively level space formed of broken stones. A rough wall, surmounted by a flat pitched roof, stared at her out of the mist. In the center of the wall a small, square, shuttered window suggested a habitation. Her head swam, and her eyes ached dreadfully; but she knew that this was the hut, and strove desperately to appear self possessed.
“Accept my congratulations, Miss Wynton,” said a low voice at her ear. “Not one woman in a thousand would have gone through that last half-hour without a murmur. You are no longer a novice. Allow me to present you with the freedom of the Alps. This is one of the many châteaux at your disposal.”
A wild swirl of sleet lashed them venomously. This first whip of the gale seemed to have the spitefulness of disappointed rage.
Helen felt her arm grasped. Bower led her to a doorway cunningly disposed out of the path of the dreaded southwest wind. At that instant all the woman in her recognized that the man was big, and strong, and self reliant, and that it was good to have him near, shouting reassuring words that were whirled across the rock-crowned glacier by the violence of the tempest.
